Ionut Emil Iacob

A framework for management of concurrent XML markup

The problem of concurrent markup hierarchies in XML encodings of documents has attracted attention of a number of humanities researchers in recent years. The key problem with using concurrent hierarchies to encode documents is that markup in one hierarchy is not necessarily well-formed with respect to the markup in another hierarchy. Previously proposed solutions to this problem rely on the XML expertise of the editors and their ability to maintain correct DTDs for complex markup languages. In this paper, we approach the problem of maintenance of concurrent XML markup from the Computer Science perspective. We propose a framework that allows the editors to concentrate on the semantic aspects of the encoding, while leaving the burden of maintaining XML documents to the software. The paper describes the formal notion of the concurrent markup languages and the algorithms for automatic maintenance of XML documents with concurrent markup.

Support for XML markup of image-based electronic editions

Image-based electronic editions enable researchers to view and study in an electronic environment historical manuscript images intricately linked to edition, transcript, glossary and apparatus files. Building image-based electronic editions poses a two-fold challenge. For humanities scholars, it is important to be able to use image and text to successfully encode the desired features of the manuscripts. Computer Scientists must find mechanisms for representing markup in its association both with the images, text and other auxiliary files and for making the representation available for efficient querying. This paper addresses the architecture of one such solution, that uses efficient data structures to store image-based encodings in main memory and on disk.

Parsing concurrent XML

Concurrent markup hierarchies appear often in document-centric XML documents, as a result of different XML elements having overlapping scopes. They require significantly different approach to management and maintenance. Management of XML documents composed of concurrent markup has been mostly studied by the document processing community and has attracted attention of computer scientists only recently. In this paper we discuss the architecture of an XML parser for concurrent XML. This parser uses a GODDAG data structure in place of traditional DOM Tree to store concurrent markup on top of the document content and provides a DOM-like API that allows software developers of tools working with concurrent XML documents to use it instead of parsing each individual component with a traditional DOM XML parser. The paper describes the architecture of the parser, data structures and algorithms used and the DOM-like API.

Processing XML documents with overlapping hierarchies

The problem of overlapping markup hierarchies, first mentioned in the context of SGML, often occurs in XML text encoding applications for humanities. Previous solutions to the problem rely on manual maintenance of the markup and address only the problem of representing overlapping features in XML, leaving the issues of automated maintenance and querying open. As a consequence, traditional XML tools are of little practical use when dealing with overlapping markup. In this work we demonstrate the implementation of our framework for management of concurrent XML hierarchies from a computer science perspective. We propose an underlying model, data structures, API, and algorithms so that the most of the burden of managing concurrent XML hierarchies would be borne by the software

Checking potential validity of XML documents

The process of creation of document-centric XML documents often starts with a prepared textual content, into which the editor introduces markup. In such situations, intermediate XML is almost never valid with respect to the DTD/Schema used for the encoding. At the same time, it is important to ensure that at each moment of time, the editor is working with an XML document that can enriched with further markup to become valid. In this paper we introduce the notion of potential validity of XML documents, which allows us to distinguish between XML documents that are invalid because the encoding is simply incomplete and XML documents that are invalid because some of the DTD rules guiding the structure of the encoding were violated during the markup process. We give a linear-time algorithm for checking potential validity for documents.

xTagger: a new approach to authoring document-centric XML

The process of authoring document-centric XML documents in humanities disciplines is very different from the approach espoused by the standard XML editing software with the data-centric view of XML. Where data-centric XML is generated by first describing a tree structure of the encoding and then providing the content for the leaf elements, document-centric encodings start with content which is then marked up. In the paper we describe our approach to authoring document-centric XML documents and the tool, xTagger, originally developed for this purpose within the Electronic Boethius project, otherwise enhanced within the ARCHway project, an interdisciplinary project devoted to development of methods and software for preparation of image-based electronic editions of historic manuscripts

A Framework for Management of Concurrent XML Markup

The problem of concurrent markup hierarchies in XML encodings of works of literature has attracted attention of a number of humanities researchers in recent years. The key problem with using concurrent hierarchies to encode documents is that markup in one hierarchy is not necessarily well-formed with respect to the markup in another hierarchy. The proposed solutions to this problem rely on the XML expertise of the editors and their ability to maintain correct DTDs for complex markup languages. In this paper, we approach the problem of maintenance of concurrent XML markup from the Computer Science perspective. We propose a framework that allows the editors to concentrate on the semantic aspects of the encoding, while leaving the burden of maintaining XML documents to the software. The paper describes the formal notion of the concurrent markup languages and the algorithms for automatic maintenance of XML documents with concurrent markup.

Building image-based electronic editions using the edition production technology

We demonstrate the Edition Production Technology (EPT), an integrated development environment for building Image-based Electronic Editions (IBEE). EPT is developed in Java on top of Eclipse platform and benefits from the openness of Eclipses plugin architecture and its portability (currently EPT runs on Windows XP, Linux, and Mac OS X). EPT provides software support for building image-based digital libraries of historic documents. Starting with high resolution images of manuscripts and transcriptions of them, EPT tools provide support for creating XML encoding of the electronic edition, searching the electronic edition, linking text and images, and publishing the electronic edition (using filters and XSLT)

Extended XQuery for digital libraries

Documents have, in general, a multihierarchical structure (such as physical organization in the form of pages and lines, content organization in the form of paragraphs and sentences, etc.). Searching multihierarchical XML encoding presents a number of unique challenges for both computer scientists and document experts. We present an extension of the XQuery language suitable for searching multihierarchical XML

A framework for processing complex document-centric XML with overlapping structures

Management of multihierarchical XML encodings has attracted attention of a number of researchers both in databases [8] and in humanities[10]. Encoding documents using multiple hierarchies can yield overlapping markup. Previously proposed solutions to management of document-centric XML with overlapping markup rely on the XML expertise of humans and their ability to maintain correct schemas for complex markup languages.We demonstrate a unified solution for management of complex, multihierarchical document-centric XML. Our framework includes software for storing, parsing, in-memory access, editing and querying, multihierarchical XML documents with conflicting structures.